a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, and Context by Dara Wier

There are so many occasions for absolute silence, complete amnesia, few words, aphasia. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We are made speechless (again) by bliss or in grief.

In extremes, in shocks, in sudden irreversible steps;

in deep love and devotion;

in sudden presentations of beauty,

in steady attention to fire, say, or water.

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We find ourselves without words. Words can’t be shaped to fit what we can’t know we’re positively feeling.

And what is strange and beautiful and good is that when we do find words we often in a poem are most likely to be closest to what is unwordable, unsayable, something that has to remain unspoken, unworded or else it will be destroyed or otherwise disappear.

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Yves Tanguy Multiplication of the Arcs MOMA

Find a way into that space in which contradiction and multi-dimensional paradox can be apprehended

Or more clearly, find a way to prepare one’s mind so that contradictions in abundance and multi-dimensional, omniscient and omnipresent paradox rushes in because it seeks an environment in which it can thrive

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we are most vulnerable, we are more receptive, or receptors are more sensitive, we are more available

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to shocks of feeling our being is inside all else

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we are droste effects!

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Sally on Mad Men: “When I think about forever I get upset. Like the Land of Lakes butter has that Indian girl, sitting holding a box, and it has a picture of her on it, holding a box, with a picture of her on it, holding a box. Have you ever noticed that?”

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we are inside undivided!

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it feels true to being alive

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it is worth seeing how one can create circumstances, how

when art generates circumstances favorable to these conditions

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in which one is more likely to be inside mystery……….

in which one can be near mystery, up against it, nearby…….

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Eudora Welty:

I do not know even now what it was that I was waiting to see; but in those days I was convinced that I almost saw it at every turn.

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible—-actually a powerful position.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what…………………….

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And next I’m going to confess to a terrible weakness for contrariness.

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Dara Wier is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, and Hat on a Pond. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her awards include the Poetry Center and Archives Book of the Year Award, a Pushcart Prize, theAmerican Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She edits Factory Hollow Press. Visit her author page at Wave Books or read an interview.